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Title: Heart of Darkness
ISBN: 1599869500
Author:
Joseph Conrad
Publicate Date: 2007-11-07
Publish: 2007-11-07
List Price: $4.99
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $4.46
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $4.00
Amazon Merchant Price: $4.99
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| Customer Review: |
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1: "Exterminate all the brutes!"
"Heart of Darkness" is Joseph Conrad's nightmare vision of colonialism in the Africa of the 1890's: cynical bureaucrats - callous, incompetent, greedy and stupid to a man - exploiting the locals, spreading death and devastation, squeezing profits from a miserable trade in elephant tusks; while the most "advanced" and idealistic of company agents, a "universal genius" named Kurtz - runs totally amuck, setting himself up as a god among the natives, raiding villages, beheading "rebels", practicing "unspeakable" rites, all on the theory that his "methods" will turn a mere trading post into a "beacon of humanizing, improving and instructing." When his ideals are thwarted, Kurtz has another prescription: "Exterminate all the brutes."
HOD is a great piece of writing, complex and ambiguous enough to support any number of interpretations. But not all of them are well-founded. Chinua Achebe, to take an example, criticizes Conrad's picture of Africa as "racist". This misses the point of the novel, which is not to depict Africans with factual accuracy, but to explore the minds and methods of the colonialists - especially their tendency to be corrupted by isolation, power and moral pretension. Conrad is an 'equal-opportunity pessimist' and one should not expect flattering portraits of Africans in a book filled with scathing portraits of Europeans. Nor would it make sense for Marlow - Conrad's narrator - to describe the Africans - whom he has only observed superficially - with an insider's sophistication and empathy. Marlow is a level-headed fellow of broad sympathies, but not, thankfully, a multiculturalist or a purveyor of politcally correct cliches.
The central character - Kurtz - is prophetic: With his charisma, his extremism, his self-delusion, his gift for spellbinding oratory, his egomania parading itself as humanitarian zeal - he foreshadows the intellectual charlatans and mass-killers of the 20th Century, from Lenin to Jim Jones.
A remarkable work.
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2: One Book That Altered My Life
Faces
After reading "HOD" years ago, I discovered or came to understand that I could never get around this book. First, like many others, I enjoy traveling to dangerous and exotic places. Once, I hitch hiked through France alone, frequently sleeping in open pastures or parks. Often in the middle of night, I would wake up in the night and feel that sense of oneness with a universe that was at once hostile yet sustaining, a feeling that I found in Conrad's masterpiece. Second, when trapped by life, at the end of some existential tunnel so to speak, (Lost job, lost love, etc) HOD could bring joy to my heart. NO other book like it!
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3: a book about someone who doesnt feel
I was expecting much more when I purchased this book. A good read-maybe, a classic that all should come in contact with-no. I was expecting a classic since it is a required college book in many undergraduate English classes.
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4: still waiting
My book had not arrived in the time period stated and I contacted the seller and received no answer as of yet.
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5: One of the first glimpses into of the horrors of European Colonialism
I was forced to reread this book after purchasing the more recent "King Leopold's Ghost," which I have also reviewed.
Even though Conrad's book was a novel based loosely on events he, or other had witnessed, the events in "King Leopold's Ghost" were not fiction at all, but the "real modern day deal."
It was this novel that was the first to expose the true horrors of European colonialism on the African continent. It tells the story of a supremely successful collector of Elephant tusks, which were being taken from the Belgian Congo for the purpose of trading them on the world market for ivory. Kurz's business was successful only because of the brutality and immorality of his techniques: He swindled, stole and killed Africans in the hundreds if not the thousands to stay ahead of the competition. And just as happened a generation later, by the diminutive and brutal Belgian King, no one asked any questions about his brutal techniques.
The phrase" The Heart of Darkness," referring to the heart of the white colonists, came to replace the phrase "darkest Africa" as a result of this novel. Its beauty lies in Conrad's failed attempt to re-humanize Kurtz as a symbolic image of redemption in the name of all the white colonists that had heaped carnage upon Africa.
But the author's efforts fell short both in the novel and in reality because in Conrad's hands, Kurtz was turned into "a less than ideal moral man." He became a man who learned to come to grips with the evil he had spawn, by discovering that he was not an inherently wicked man, but one who was god-fearing and capable of the "natural moral superiority" that the white man was supposed to have over the more savage Africans. The question of which man was the more savage was left "hanging in the air" in the novel.
Unless you are white, turning to "the white man's religion" where moral superiority is still claimed by fiat is not much redemption. But at least it is something. Apparently the novel did not have the desired moral effect in reality either, as history can attest. It may in fact well have had just the opposite effect: as the Belgians repeated the same ghastly and brutal experiment a generation later, only this time with diamonds instead of ivory. Despite all this, and the goriness of the content, it is still a powerfully told story by a master of his craft.
Five Stars
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